The Submission Chain

The Transitive Property and Trump

To normalize what is happening is to take part in the regime change.  For a writer, normalization means pretending that the same concepts that once applied still do apply.  When we do that, we destroy the concepts. 

For an unfamiliar politics we will need experimentation.  Two essays ago, this meant reconsidering a historical cliché; last time, it meant a sitcom pitch; this time, we will do some applied math.

You might remember the transitive property.  If one number (x) is lesser than another number (y) and (y) is lesser than (z), then we can be certain that (x) is lesser than (z).  Or: if x < y and y < z, then x < z. 

The mathematical notation can help us define a submission chain: who submits to whom in the Trumpian oligarchy.  If we can lay this out plainly, we might see some openings for understanding -- and for action.  And so, to begin:

Trump voters  <  Trump

Trump voters have chosen a Leader, someone with a story.  Many of them believe that he is a billionaire, that he won the election of 2020, that Russia had nothing to do with it, that Haitians in Ohio eat cats, and so on.  In other words, many of them believe in lies that, at some level, they know to be lies.  This is submission; living inside someone else's story always is.  And thus many Trump voters are choosing to be manipulated in a certain kind of venture, one in which politics must be about division (sorry, more math!).  If politics begins from lies and you accept that, you can always "own" the other side, because they will be upset not only by your winning but also by the lies you repeat.  For many Trump voters, this is what power means: "owning the libs." 

I remember the first time I heard this phrase: in rural southwestern Ohio, in 2016.  And what I thought then was: just because he upsets other Americans, how does that help you?  How does that help our country?  "Owning the libs" does not get us far in international politics. Usually democratic power is about multiplication: we bring people together, we can pass some laws, people might benefit.  But Trump's domestic power is division, making America much weaker than it would be in foreign affairs.  The United States is strong as a republic (flawed though that republic might be).  It is weaker when its ruler aspires to be a divider and a dictator.  And thus the very power that Trump voters see in Trump is, seen from any external perspective, weakness.  This is how the next step of the formula is possible:

Trump voters <  Trump  < Putin, therefore Trump voters < Putin

At this point the Trump voters protest!  The moment the subject Russia is raised, Trump supporters defend their submission to Trump by defending him from the charge that he is submissive to Russia.  They have been trained to use the word "hoax," which emerges like an auto-response to the word "Russia."  Trump supporters (and Russians pretending to be Trump supporters on the internet) have bullied the press with the "hoax" taunt for so long and so hard that media seem frightened of the subject, even though every serious journalist who has worked on the subject knows that Russia backs Trump and has backed Trump for years and years. 

The "hoax" taunt, incidentally, or perhaps not so incidentally, is what the Russians call "reflexive control."  A psychological environment is created in which you do not what you want to do but what Russia wants you to do.  You know that if you write about Russia's persistent and obvious backing of Donald Trump, a chorus of "hoax" will follow you.  And so you do not do it.  And so, even when Russia blatantly interfered in this presidential election on election day by way of bomb threats to dozens precincts with Democratic majorities, this got little attention.  This reflex does so much work these days that even new and obvious examples of Russian support for Trump get absorbed by it! 

Trump knows that Russia's backing of him is not a hoax, and Putin knows that it is not a hoax.  Russia's support for him is so much on Trump's mind that he seeks to appoint as CIA director someone who believes will expunge the record of what Trump called in the announcement "fake Russian collusion."  In fact, the CIA at the time, along with all other US intelligence agencies, judged that Russia had intervened to support the Trump campaign.  After the election, the evidence only mounted.  I wrote an entire book that led to this episode (Road to Unfreedom), tracing its sources back to ideological changes in Russia and technological changes that allowed for the intervention.  The Mueller Report, though little read and dismissed, actually makes the case quite indisputably that Russia supported Trump; indeed, even its critics did not directly question that, but rather focused on the idea that it did not prove collusion.  This was not really true, either; there was plenty of collusion, but Mueller thought that this was better left for an impeachment than a prosecution, which got us into the square dance of legal irresponsibility around Trump in which we still find ourselves.

One can debate the sources of Trumps submissiveness to Putin.  Is it mainly all the money made from the licensing agreements?  Is it mainly admiration for the billionaire oligarch, something that Trump clearly wants to be?  Is it mainly gratitude for the electoral assistance, for the favor that Russia now explicitly calls in?  Is it a more complicated manipulation of Trump's ego, combining elements of all these?  Or is it that the Russians are actually capable of blackmailing him directly, as people who spend time with him tend to believe?  Is it now that Trump and Musk and Putin, in all of their calls these last two years, have cooked up something between themselves?  Whatever the causes, the results up to now have been unmistakable.  Trump portrays Putin as a great leader, says that he trusts him more than his own advisors, praises his invasion of Ukraine as "brilliant," and now proposes a defender of Putinism as director of national intelligence. 

There is no conceivable argument from US national interests to propose Tulsi Gabbard for that most critical position.  She has zero relevant experience. The only thing for which she is known is her support of Putin (and Assad). Her candidacy is, quite literally, a proposal that can only have emerged in Moscow, where she is known as a "Russian agent" or as "our girlfriend."

Trump voters <  Trump  < Putin < Xi, therefore Trump voters <  Xi

Trump voters, of course, would resist this formula, and so would the pro-Trump elite.  Surely Trump, if nothing else, is a China hawk?  Yet whatever Trump might say, he cannot possibly mount a policy that deters China if he is submissive to Putin.  The Russian leader is in an inferior position to the Chinese leader; Russia's war on Ukraine has reduced Putin very much to the position of beseeching client.  So to be Putin's client, as Trump very much appears to be, is also to be Xi's. 

But I don't insist on this just as a logical consequence of the transitive property of submission.  The relationship is concrete and specific and has to do with Ukraine.  If Trump submits to Putin on Ukraine, he not only demonstrates that he is incapable of dealing with China, he surrenders in advance to China. 

This logic is clear to essentially everyone in the world except Americans, who tend to see themselves as only having bilateral relationships with other countries, and to always be in the dominant role.  We might imagine that we are in a bilateral relationship with Ukraine, and with Russia, and with China, and can do as we choose with respect to each.  But these relationships are deeply intertwined. 

Ukrainian resistance deters China in way that we cannot deter China ourselves.  Virtually anything the United States does to deter China can be seen as provocative.  Simply by defending itself, however, Ukraine demonstrates that offensive operations are difficult and unpredictable.  Should Trump submit to Putin and try to force Ukraine to surrender, this deterrent affect disappears. 

And of course China is watching what we do (again, whether we realize this or not!).  Not only in Beijing but in all the world beyond America's allies the thinking is essentially such: if the United States cannot help to defend Ukraine, which is an easy case, there is no way that the United States would help to defend Taiwan. 

Why is Ukraine an easy case?  Because we have no troops in Ukraine and never will; because the case fits perfectly our explicit commitment to defending democracy; and because we enjoy, with our allies, an overwhelming economic advantage over Russia.  And so, if the United States tries to surrender Ukraine to Putin, this is not only submission to XI, it is an invitation to a far broader war, one that might have been deterred simply by continuing to back Ukraine.

I write "tries to surrender Ukraine to Russia" advisedly.  Ukraine is not ours to surrender.  Trump can himself surrender, but he cannot surrender on behalf of Ukraine.  And precisely because Trump has been to persistently submissive in his dealings with Putin, the Russians assume that his opening offer, whatever it is, can be improved by ignoring him or abusing him. 

Putin and his Kremlin subordinates are certainly mocking Trump at the moment: denying that a phone call took place when Trump says it did; escalating viciously in Ukraine after Trump claimed that he told Putin not to escalate; showing pornographic photographs of Trump's wife on Russian state television; suggesting that Trump owes his presidency to Russia (Patrushev); predicting that Trump will be assassinated if he does not do Russia's bidding (Medvedev).  All of this emphasizes Trump < Putin. 

But for Putin this is also in some sense a bluff.  The war in Ukraine, although horrible costly for the Ukrainian defenders, is also a disaster for Russia.  The Russians are taking horrible losses for minor advances.  They are using North Korean soldiers in a battle to try to regain Russian territory from Ukrainians.  If, when Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, someone had forecast that "in about three years, Russia will be deploying North Koreans to try to retake Ukrainian-occupied portions of Kursk oblast" that would have seemed insane.  But that is where we are.  The Russians have been telling themselves for two years that a Trump victory will mean their victory in Ukraine, and they will no doubt try to prove themselves right.  Continuing the offensive and bullying Trump are two sides of the same coin. 

Theoretically, Trump could break out of this logic.  As the Ukrainians keep trying to remind us, Russia will only seek peace if it believes that it is losing.  Russia will only believe that if the United States aids Ukraine more rather than less.  But this is impossible so long as it remains the case that Trump  < Putin, so long as that part of the submission chain holds.  And so long as that link is unbroken, it also remains true that Trump < Xi.  There can be no successful China policy without the right Ukraine policy.  And, so long as that is the case, Trump voters < Xi, whether they like it or not.  This is not what they voted for, and not what the Trumpist elite promised, but it will be the case.

To be sure, the transitive property of submission does not capture everything about domestic and international politics.  But I believe that it does capture something quite important that conventional thinking might not.  We will never understand the choice of Tulsi Gabbard in terms of democracy or national interest or by any of the familiar concepts.  It does make sense as part of a submission chain (or on Oligarchs' Island). 

By making ourselves smaller than we need to be at home, we also make ourselves smaller than we might like to be abroad.  If we have a president who considers himself an aspiring dictator among real dictators, the United States is weak where it might have been strong.  When we enter the personalistic kinds of relationships that Trump favors and claims to thrive in, we find ourselves in a submissive position that no one ever actually wanted -- no one, except for Trump, Putin, and Xi.